Thursday, June 19, 2014

The American Presidents: Grover Cleveland

Grover Cleveland (1837 – 1908) was the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. During the Civil War,Cleveland paid a Polish immigrant to serve in his place, like many well-off men did. In the early 1870s, as sheriff of Erie County, Cleveland personally executed two men. In the 1880s, he served as mayor of Buffalo, and then governor of New York. As president, he pushed for the passage of the Dawes Act, which had the effect of further weakening Native American tribal governments. Shortly after Cleveland's second term began, the Panic of 1893 struck the stock market, and created an economic depression, which in turn created labor strikes across the country, such as Coxley's Army (a group of unemployed men who marched on the White House, to protest Cleveland's economic policies), and the Pullman Strike (125,000 railroad workers protesting wage cuts). In both cases, Cleveland used federal troops to quell the strikes. He was the only president married in the White House. He was 49. His wife was 21. Regarding the women's suffrage movement, Cleveland once wrote: "Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by men and women in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence."